Monday, August 18, 2014

New travelers on an old path

Every movie I've seen the last two weeks has shown the trailer for Interstellar. If you've missed it you can watch it here. It's probably the most vague trailer I've ever seen and yet, I have a pretty good idea what direction the story will take. It's not a new concept in sci-fi. Ken Liu's Mono No Aware (you can read it here) and Mary Robinette Kowal's The Lady Astronaut of Mars (you can read it here) are beautifully written examples. Neither is derivative and that's certainly not my concern for Interstellar. I'm worried that because it's so vague that the general public either won't be interested or they won't realize what they're in for.

I'm going to ignore the possibility of bad science and trust that Christopher Nolan and his team did their research. They did a great job of making the gadgets in the Batman films functional in a real world sense so I'm willing to take a leap of faith on that. The possible conclusions for the story however...

There are a couple forks in this particular story path. The first is whether or not they can establish Earth 2.0. Astronomers have already found some likely candidates so if my research assumption holds true than the film will focus more on preparing the selected planet for the coming settlers. If I'm wrong than they'll waste screen time with an improbable search that could have been done by satellites and drones instead of people. The average American probably won't be bothered by it but those of us who actually pay attention to science will be throwing popcorn at the screen.

The second fork is whether or not they make it back home. This path has no in between. They either make it or they don't. If they do, Yay! Happy ending. If they don't (which I think is more likely) it's going to be a massive tear jerker that will catch many an unsuspecting viewer off guard.

Unfortunately we're going to have to wait until November to find out which direction the story takes. If they've done it right this has the potential to be a spectacular film but I'm not going to get my hopes up. Heaven knows Hollywood has let us down plenty of times before.

About Me

In addition to being a writer I'm the event coordinator at Reader's Guide -- an independant bookstore in Salem, Oregon -- and a (mostly) retired stage actor.
In 2013 I won the Named Lands Poetry Contest with a haiku and in 2014 I went from being unpublished to SFWA eligible in twenty-four hours. My short stories have appeared in multiple volumes of Fiction River, as well in the Eclipse Phase anthology. My debut novel, The Moonflower was released in 2017.
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